30 Years of Consumer Storage: From Floppy Disks to SSDs

From technology to capacity to price, the last three decades have seen astonishing changes in the PC storage landscape. In honor of the 30th anniversary of the PC, we look at the evolution of PC storage.

Those too young to remember the floppy disk era—or even those who were around back then but not yet paying attention—may wonder how we ever clawed our way to the present. Those 5.25-inch disks' flimsy plastic, easily scratchable storage surface, and incredibly inconvenient size and shape make them about as foreign to our contemporary sensibilities as reading by candlelight. But for millions of people at the dawn of the PC age three decades ago, those disks not only stored programs and data, they defined the very experience of using a computer. For many of us, even if we carry around USB-based flash drives or portable hard drives, they still do.

Then, as now, storage wasn't a necessary evil—it was a desirable necessity: a magnetic security blanket that let you sleep soundly knowing your business files, your personal documents, and even your most creative ideas were both safe and nearby whenever you needed them. The hardware of the era hadn't yet reached the point where it could handle photos or music (to say nothing of video!), so most users' needs were fairly modest. But ultimately, storage was as important to computer users then as it is to computer users today.

There's no way to look at the last 30 years of home computing without also examining the storage devices that made so much of it possible. From those floppy disks, so dependent on the spinning of a traditional drive mechanism, to today's solid-state drives, which work without utilizing any moving parts, the evolution of storage has paralleled not just that of PC technology, but also of the way we use it. By looking at how we solved the problems of the past, and how far we've come in so little time, we can see how we might approach our ever-expanding storage needs in the future—and what mistakes we definitely don't want to repeat.

Check out the following slideshow to see our visual tour through consumer storage devices, from then until now. You might be surprised at how much things have changed since 1981—and, in a very real way, how much they haven't. Unlike some areas of the PC industry, when it comes to storage, the most significant difference is scale.

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8. Flash Cards

8. Flash Cards

Owners of phones and cameras, whether of the still or video variety, take flash cards for granted today, as they provide enough storage space to last until you can offload your photos or videos. But they, too, had to start somewhere. Flash memory was developed in the early 1980s, but not popularized until over a decade later, when SanDisk produced the first CompactFlash disks (built around NOR, rather than NAND, flash); Intel’s MiniCard and Toshiba’s SmartMedia card followed suit within a year or so. Cards using these, and other subsequent formats (such as Secure Digital, or SD), were always ideal for laptops, which had (and, in many cases, still have) limited space for hard or optical drives. And as computers became more powerful, and photo- and video-editing software became more useful outside of professional or even just hobbyist conclaves of PC owners, flash card readers began showing up on desktops as well, often in bays that had previously been occupied by 3.5-inch drives. Flash cards have never represented a major storage system for PC users, even as flash memory itself has become the next-generation way of storing data in USB and solid-state drives. But they’ve grown increasingly useful as a supplement now that everyone has some way of capturing data on—and thus some desire to want to read—these go-anywhere solutions.